One of our fellow ANCOR members in Ohio shared a template they developed to track employees and visitors to their programs. The form explains that the individuals served at the location are at risk and in order to protect individuals, they are asking people entering the building to disclose if they have any symptoms associated with COVID-19, including a temperature check. The attached template is available for anyone interested in utilizing the tool.

There has been an exciting update to the Plenary 3 Session at the 2019 RCPA Annual Conference: Impact. On Friday, September 27, 10:45 am – 11:45 am in the Red Ballroom, John “Jack” Rozel, MD, MSL, Medical Director, Resolve Crisis Services, UPMC Western Psychiatric Hospital, will give a presentation on the evidence available regarding the relationship between gun violence, mass shootings, and mental health disorders.

Public discourse and public policy on firearm injury prevention are routinely driven by outlier tragedies such as mass shootings: Orlando, Newtown, Las Vegas, and too many others to list. News media and pundit responses to these events often drive misinformation and inspire misguided and ineffective policy. Exploring the complex interplay between violence, firearms, and mental illness in modern America from the perspective of a forensic and emergency psychiatrist, this presentation explores how evidence-based policies and interventions could have a meaningful impact on firearm injury prevention with minimal impact on Constitutional rights. While this is a less clinical topic, it is invariably timely and salient and is intended to demystify and debunk common misperceptions about the issue held by advocates on both sides of this important problem. An emphasis will be made on interventions which can usefully scale across different types of gun violence.

Dr. Rozel has served as an incident commander for mass shootings and been involved in the behavioral health response to several mass casualty events. He was a major contributor to the National Council for Behavioral Health’s 2019 report on Mass Violence. Dr. Rozel is currently working with a team to develop best practices for violence risk screening for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline network and was recently appointed to the Pennsylvania Governor’s Special Council on Gun Violence. See Dr. Rozel’s full bio here. @ViolenceWonks on Twitter.